The March 29 letter said that the Collaborative for Educational Services, of Northampton, the public non-profit agency hired to manage Dean, “does not appear to be providing the ‘rapid and dramatic’ intervention the students at Dean Vocational School deserve.”

Concerns include lack of effective leadership to establish a turnaround plan, lack of a comprehensive aligned curriculum and classroom instruction that lacked high expectations, said the letter.

The letter was signed by Lynda L. Foisy, senior associate commissioner, division of accountability, partnerships and assistance, and addressed to Holyoke School Superintendent David L. Dupont.

But an official from the Collaborative – which didn’t begin managing Dean until mid-July – questioned how such a judgment could be made less than a year into an effort dominated by problems entrenched in the city’s vocational school for years.

“It’s pretty early to be able to draw those conclusions,” Collaborative Deputy Director William Diehl said in a phone interview.

Diehl and Collaborative Executive Director Joan E. Schuman are scheduled to meet with Foisy on Thursday, he said.

The School Committee discussed the state letter briefly Monday and has scheduled a special meeting on the issue April 17 at 6:15 p.m. at Dean, 1045 Main St.

The state ordered the city to hire a manager for Dean because of Dean students’ chronically poor test results. Federal and other grants are paying the agency $606,520.

David Dupont

Dupont said after Monday’s meeting he didn’t consider Foisy’s letter to be a criticism of the Collaborative, but instead, amounted to the state finding fault with the application to renew the grant that is paying the Collaborative.

Only the superintendent is authorized to decide whether the Collaborative will return to run Dean after the current school year ends in June, and Dupont said he was unable to answer that question Monday.

But Diehl said the content of Foisy’s letter was unambiguous.

“It is a criticism,” Diehl said.

Devin M. Sheehan, School Committee vice chairman, said Foisy’s letter does allege shortcomings in the Collaborative’s plans for Dean.

“I can say that this does show that they did not correctly show a plan for rigor and turnaround,” Sheehan said after the meeting.

Dean has more than 650 students and 160 teachers and other staff.

In February, Dupont filed a report to the School Committee that listed 23 areas of concern about the job that the Collaborative has done in running Dean.

The concerns in Dupont’s report included lack of identifiable leadership, lack of vision, poor scheduling, inconsistent enforcement of rules, confusion about graduation requirements, length of time in filling vacancies and data incorrectly entered into the computer system.

The Collaborative responded at the time that many of Dupont’s criticisms were addressed or were in process of being corrected.

On the 2010 MCAS test, only 28 percent of Dean students were at the proficient or advanced levels in English language arts and 31 percent in math.

Another major challenge in improving students’ academic performan is that the percentage of Dean students for whom English is not the first language is 72 percent. Statewide, the rate is 15.6 percent. Nearly half the city of 40,000 Hispanic.

In the 2009-2010 school year, Dean attendance was 79.6 percent, meaning students missed an average of seven weeks of school a year.

Dean’s high school graduation rate was only 37 percent, at the time the Collaborative was hired, while the statewide high school graduation rate was 82.1 percent.